Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.
The Honorable Governor of Texas, George W. Bush

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tuesday, October 04, 2005

le sequoit: The First Year

It seems that I've let the first anniversary of this effort slip right on past, long about during West Wing or so. I've decided to provide a few highlights, or so I'd like to think.

On Republicans:

I would guess that somewhere in the middle of a business related deductible $200.00 dinner or $180.00 round of golf Mr. Mann and Mr. Brownwell discovered that they were both Republicans.

On social "conservatives":

Some children will be forced by the government to reveal their sins to their parents in the name of Family Values while, against their parents wishes, others must choose between castigation by their peers or prayer to the Christian God.

On class:

Being in the "middle" class means questioning whether you can afford matching ATV's to tow behind your SUV. Being in the median class means wondering how you will replace your Honda Civic when it croaks.

How much more can we be set against each other in the workplace, squeezed of every last bit of productivity while our economic realities are finely engineered to maintain us at the breaking point?

Many capitalists have admitted the inequality of the system as practiced is a barrier to its ultimate success, but the difficulty of institutionalizing a more egalitarian system while maintaining the freedom of the individual to aspire within it―and the daunting task of wresting power from those who have hijacked the system―leave this barrier to refortify itself, as witnessed in a continuing, deepening rift between the upper and upper middle classes and the true middle class.

On the "vitality" of candidates:

…in the absence of someone who might be intelligently decisive I like the survivability of the intelligent non-decision over that of the unintelligent decision.

On the Bush administration:

To be Secretary of State for this regime all you really need is a copy/fax machine and an intact middle finger!

On censorship:

It's a fool's game, played by whiny hypocrites on one side and adolescent schoolboys on the other.

On Gertrude Himmelfarb's reference that the welfare society has "emasculated" the culture of "traditional republican and Puritan virtue":

If masculinity is equivalent to vitality, then am I not wasting my time reading this woman’s book?

On gun control:

Most gun owners are law abiding. Most gun owners are non-urban. Most gun victims are urban. Most gun owners can live with that.

On cheap labor:

This is about those who put patriotic stickers on their Hummers while they've not hired an American in ten years.

On computers:

Clearly the renaissance of my life (not to mention my spelling proficiency) is owed to Microsoft’s abstraction of it into one great, big video game.

On the birth of religion:

The man had come to notice that the chief would bestow upon him certain favors in response for his good answers and thus spoke boldly words that any might have, “The sun goes to a distant hunting ground.”

On labor:

…but to speak the language of labor is at this point like giving the Latin Mass.

On a previous fascist regime:

It was only on the rise that appeals to the godly to oppose the godless were deemed necessary.

On jurisprudence:

Free speech ends at the corporate boundary.

On conservation:

how do you renew energy, anyway? With a perpetual motion drivengenerator?

On the left/right monster:

We land on each issue according to the side we have chosen, rather than the other way around.

On the money machine of American universities' research efforts:

How will an Alexander Fleming have the flexibility to consider the accident in his Petri dish made by some Penicillium notatum that happened to blow in from downstairs?

On politicians:

Son of George Allen

It’s high time the children of America learnedthat there are no short cuts tosuccess.

Son of Sununu

Here! Here!

On parents and children:

Alas, our children did not benefit from such untelevisionary thinking and, as one goes off to law school and two Big Ten Universities are bidding for the other’s graduate study, it is with great shame that I admit that we let them watch Dangermouse and You Can’t Do That on Television.

...now the interviewee's child plays "on his own" and so develops ability to construct socially "on his own" in free play portions of practice, but for safety's sake within eyesight and earshot of five or six adults. Right.

We may talk a fine game about too much government but when it comes down to your money and my money—even on the corner of Reagan Boulevard and Hoover Trail—a little socialism can be just the ticket.

On generational nonsense:

The Sixties is when we stood up to “The Greatest Generation” and told them to shove their military industrial complex up their asses. There was nothing “relativistic” about that, you can be sure.

As to we being the “me first” generation and they out to “make a better world”, it is they who stand idly by while the less fortunate of their peers are enticed into service and dispatched to be picked off one by one in a foreign war of domestic political design.

On church and state:

Anyone who thinks religious education in public schools would be any less about cross bearing than history education is about flag waving has been dipping a bit too heavily into the sacramental wine.

On military adventurism and the latest Iraq war:

It is immoral to punch someone in the face because you fear that some day they will be big enough to punch back.

Let the Chinese keep the peace; that oughta take us off the effigy pole.

On infernal combustion and the American male:

All week long they await the wild splendor of the pine forest, only to streak through it so fast that it blurs.

On golf:

Seeing a fivesome ahead of you is a lot like coming over a rise on the expressway and seeing a couple hundred brake lights lit up ahead. It ain't even legal. It ain't even a Microsoft® Word!

On religion:

Religion has always led humanity off on some strange tangents, the happiest result of which is that such behavior remains harmless and the flock is well enough off the beaten path so as not to impede progress for the rest of us.

At any rate, I'm not all that impressed with the design effort, which is, I guess, why they don't call it Supremely Intelligent Design.

On Hurricane Katrina:

It's not called the National Guard for nothing.

Fear not, though, for in Norfolk the freaking Navy is almost on the way.

On Wisconsin seceding from the Union, except for Milwaukee, Racine and Kenosha:

Of course, we would have to import a few million Harley Davidsons a year, but at least we could make them put real mufflers on them.

On American Exceptonalism:

It's a puzzlement that we are the world's most enthusiastic consumers of air fresheners, as clearly our shit doesn't stink.

Canadians don't have "I support the troops but what I really mean is that I support the war" stickers and they don't proclaim themselves saved or in a really tight relationship with Jesus, either. They seem to require less self-convincing.

On the free market system:

This supply cycle is just another loop the average joe increasingly has no place within.

It's all about supply and demand. Their supply, and their demand.

On whatever:

"Timing is everything", they say, though this was certainly truer in the days before electronic ignition.